Young Ottawa man reflects on gunshot trauma that changed his life

A young Ottawa man is expressing gratitude to Ottawa’s emergency response services for not only saving his life, but giving him a new perspective.

Brandon Peacock was just 23 in June 2020 when he was shot three times. In the thick of the pandemic, the young man spent his days working from home. But one decision to leave his house for a brief moment to get a hair cut changed his life for ever. But it could have also been a blessing in disguise.

As he reached the door to the barbershop, shots rang out. Shielding a woman, Peacock writes he felt three bullets enter his body. One entered below his shoulder blade and come out at his collarbone, missing his heart and lungs. The second ricocheted off the wall and hit his knee. But the third blew the femoral artery in his right leg, also known as a “kill shot”.

Peacock didn’t have a lot of time, but he was determined to survive. When police arrived four minutes later, they applied a tourniquet to his leg and rushed him to the trauma centre.

“He talked to me the whole time. He spoke to me like I was his son,” Peacock writes in a firsthand account on The Ottawa Hospital Foundation website.

From then on, everything happened really fast.

Peacock was tended to by a huge team of surgeons, nurses and residents, part of The Ottawa Hospital’s trauma team. After initial triage, his leg was the biggest concern. Peacock’s parents were told their son had a 50/50 chance of survival.

“As you can imagine, they were distraught, but they remained hopeful that I would beat the odds,” Peacock said. His team of surgeons also had high hopes.

When he woke up from his surgery, Peacock still had both of his legs, but his stay in the hospital was far from over.

“Everyone moves fast, everyone needs to know what they’re doing, and that’s how we save people. We have a system in place and a team ready to go; that’s why trauma patients do better at trauma centres,” Dr. Jacinthe Lampron, the lead trauma surgeon on Peacock’s case said in an interview on the hospital foundation website.

Even after the initial surgery, the team remained quick-thinking, performing further procedures to make sure Peacock had the best chance at life.

Peacock was diagnosed with compartment syndrome, a build up of pressure around the muscles. His was a result of the blood that had pooled in his leg. The solution was a double fasciotomy – a lengthy emergency procedure and his best chance at coming out the other side with two legs.

Peacock knew statistics were not on his side, but he woke up after eight hours on the operating table with both of his legs.

For a young, physically fit man who loved to play hockey, his life suddenly looked very different. Peacock woke up with a breathing tube and hooked up to a number of other devices. He had undergone multiple blood transfusions and lost a significant amount of weight.

“I was frail,” he said. “My leg was a big balloon, my ribs were broken, so all I could do was lie in bed.”

Mentally, the situation was tough on Peacock. He would awake in the night after having dreams of playing sports with his friends, just to find his reality was far from that. Two days post-op he refused his pain medication, wanting to be able to really process what happened to him.

But there was one more surgical obstacle in front of him. By day five, he was supposed to have a skin graft, due to the large fasciotomy, but the surgery kept getting pushed. Finally, a plastics specialist suggested he could slowly stitch the leg over a three day period, a success.

Peacock spent four days with next to no movement before he started working with a physiotherapist on day nine. At this point, he writes, he just wanted to go home.

The physiotherapist told him once he could walk to the end of the hallway and up two steps, he could be discharged, but that it was a goal they had to work towards slowly. Peacock did it that afternoon.

“That walk was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and since then I’ve trained for two marathons and now, I’m training for Ironman Canada,” he said. “But the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life was that hallway walk.”

Ten days after being rushed to the hospital, clinging on to life, Peacock was discharged. While many would think the pandemic would have made it difficult for Peacock to attend appointments and get the care he needed, it ended up working in his favour.

Peacock’s best friend works as a physiotherapist and his office was closed due to pandemic restrictions. Instead his friend worked with him for five hours a day, seven days a week in his home gym. The therapy not only gave Peacock something to do with his days, but it helped him bounce back very quickly.

Peacock continued his physio along with hospital checkups, during one where they removed the remaining bullet fragments from his leg. But within 60 days of being shot, Peacock ran his first five kilometre race. Since he’s run more and returned to the ice.

“It was during that time after my release from hospital when I realized this experience changed my life in many ways,” he wrote. “I looked at life differently and that’s where my new path in life began – that’s where I came up with a new plan for my life.”

Instead of focusing on climbing the corporate ladder, the young survivor created Hit the Ground Running, a charity that helps trauma survivors reach their new 100 per cent.

“It all came from that moment where I lay on the ground bleeding out thinking ‘If I don’t make it to tomorrow, am I going to be proud of the legacy that I’ve left behind?’ he said.

Now Peacock wants to express his gratitude to the team at The Ottawa Hospital and the Ottawa first responders who gave him a second shot at life. The team continues to do the same for many other trauma patients. In 2023-24, The Ottawa Hospital trauma service had a 10 per cent increase in volume compared to the year before, serving 1,148 patients. The leading cause of trauma injuries are caused by falls and motor-vehicle accidents at 43.1 percent and 34.4 per cent respectively. Thirteen per cent of traumas and from penetrating injuries, including stabbings and gun shots. Peacock was one of those.

“That fateful afternoon, I went from lying on the ground, wondering if I was going live, to today, building a great life that I love and helping others around the world who have experienced something very similar to me,” Peacock said. “And for that, I’m truly grateful and loving my life.”